This is not to say there won't be a few more surprises in the week ahead--including a potential shutdown of the government. In any case, we don't seem to be anywhere near the bottom.

There are five steps we can take to start the recovery--but it won't come quickly.

Here's my view of the recovery (see Charts page):

First, it is a recovery from the financial crisis that began in the subprime mortgage market in 2007 and spread around the world. The Great Recession has been the deepest and longest downturn since the Great Depression, with only the recovery in Japan in the 1990s producing a comparable decline in output and in unemployment. While the recovery has not been as strong as could have been, given the depth of the initial downturn, there has been progress on nearly every economic indicator: Output has begun rising (but only just barely) and jobs have begun to emerge. The recovery has been strong in many aspects of our economy--the stock market, corporate profits, capital spending, and commodity prices--but slow in the growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) and jobs. However, these two latter indicators are beginning to rise (albeit slowly).

What we need now are the "Five Steps of Recovery."

We can